Roof boards installed

The big project on the 205 for today was finishing initial installation of the roof boards. I cut the two roof boards for the middle third of the car to length with some help from Kirk Warner, hoisted them onto the roof and screwed them down. Voila!It took longer than it looks, due mainly to the need to make repeated trips between Barn 8 and the wood shop. The boards are not all perfectly level due to issues with the saddles, so I will be making up some shims to account for this, and the plan is to replace the lag screws with flat head screws once everything is even and level. Thanks also go to George Clark for helping locate drill bits and wrenches.

When I was done with this, I got our trolley poles from the corner of Barn 4 and spent a few hours wire-wheeling the rust and paint (mostly rust) off of them in preparation for priming and painting. One of the poles is shown below; this one is bent slightly at the end where it goes into the trolley base, but that should be easy to fix using the IRM-patented trolley pole straightening machine: a hole drilled in one of the posts in Barn 4.
In the foreground next to the trolley wheel is some protective headgear; safety first, as always! In other news, Jon and Dan Fenlaciki were out today, so I put in an order for a gallon of official Indiana Railroad orange, which they had gotten matched. This will allow us to paint the new doors for the 205 prior to installation, and in the spring we can start painting "finished" parts of the car orange.